A heat sensitivity in a tooth results in the most intense pain seen by the dental profession. Current methods for diagnosing the tooth from which the pain is emanating are primitive. Presently, a device does not exist for testing for a heat sensitivity in a single tooth. A patient dental history reporting a heat sensitivity in a tooth is important in diagnosing the health of the pulp tissue and the prognosis for recovery. While the patient can report such a sensitivity with relative accuracy, they are most often confused about the tooth in which the sensitivity exist. This confusion is related to how a person attempts to resolve the confusion of dental pain. For instance, if the pain is due to pressure on a tooth, the patient can usually identify the tooth by repeated testing with pressure. If the pain is related to hot or cold, testing involves putting cold or hot liquids, or cold or hot food on the teeth. This testing modality involves a much less precise test than pressing on a single tooth.
Most, if not all of the teeth in a quadrant are subjected to the thermal changes of the test. A patient feels the pain and, in many cases, thinks they know which tooth it is related to, but clinical testing demonstrates that they are incorrect much of the time. This confusion is related to neural anatomy and learning. Little space in the brain is allocated to sensory input from teeth, unlike hands which get a lot of attention and “space” in the brain. From an early age, humans begin to learn to locate where any sensation on their hand is originating from. The ability to visually perceive the area of the hand touching something helps to correlate a sensation with an act. No such relationship exist with teeth.
However, the learning process is the same. Specifically, if a person experiences a dental pain and associate it with a particular tooth your brain will not argue with you. The brain accepts it as a learning experience. If a person experiences the pain again, their brain will identify the tooth they told their brain was causing the pain. The more pain episodes the patient experiences the more reluctant they are to believe the pain could be coming from any other tooth.
A dentist can perform most of the sensitivity testing on single teeth, but a convenient, reliable, safe, method does not exist for testing for a heat sensitivity. Without a convenient, reliable, safe, method for testing for heat sensitivity, the probability of treating the wrong tooth is increased. In particular, much of a dental diagnosis is the dentist's best guess after reviewing the test results. Samples of the suspect tooth cannot be sent to a lab for analysis. That would injure the tooth, irreparably. It is considered unwise for any dentist to treat a heat sensitive tooth unless it can be identified to the patient precisely. Especially, if the patients believes it to be a different tooth. Therefore, a presumed safes action for the dentist may be to do nothing until the tooth becomes sensitive to percussion or bite sensitivity, something more easily demonstrated to the patient. The waiting period usually results in a period of intense pain for the patient; a pain which does not respond well to pain medication.
Therefore, what is needed is a convenient, safe, and reliable, testing device for testing for a heat sensitivity. While other devices have been suggested to have potential utility in testing for a heat sensitivity in teeth, they have no utility in the limited space provided for dental treatment or they disadvantageously have a flat or a rounded metal tip, which cannot conform to the convex tooth surface. Another drawback is that such devices produce a point contact with the convex tooth surface. Heat delivered in this manner must include massive amounts of heat energy to the point contact (considerably in excess of a safe limit that will not cause damage to the enamel, dentin, and the soft tissue of the pulp) to engage the enamel and dentine to become the heat source for testing the pulp tissue for a heat sensitivity. The heat emanating from a point source must be heated to much higher temperatures at the source to compensate for the small surface area conducting the heat.
Thus, in view of the above disadvantages, limits, and drawbacks, the present invention provides a convenient, reliable, and safe testing device for heat sensitivity in teeth. The device enables dentists and other professionals in the field of dentistry to have confidence in identifying a single tooth responsible for a heat sensitivity, which is extremely painful, and treat the tooth most always resulting in immediate relief to the patient.